Pooh Bridge: conscience stricken

  Pooh Bridge

  Nigel Lampard

  A　Bardel　Publication

  Published by Bardel 2015

  © Nigel Lampard 2004

  Third Edition - Pooh Bridge

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, businesses, characters, and incidents, are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organisations, events or locales, or any other entity, is entirely coincidental.

  The unauthorised reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal.

  Cover designed by Bardel

  Image provided by www.123RF.com

  Pooh Bridge is dedicated to a close family friend, Nancy Blatherwick, who died in August 2000 after a long illness.

  Nancy was an inspiration when she was alive and she still is.

  Chapter One

  She was lying in the undergrowth a little way off a well-trodden track.

  If I had not chosen that particular track, in that particular wood, I would never have found her and someone else, by virtue of either diligence or their dog rooting around in the undergrowth, would have made the grim discovery.

  It was early evening in late May with the sun setting on what had been a beautiful and warm day. Before entering the wooded valley, I had rested as I contemplated my next move.

  Having bought what I needed for another week, I was looking for somewhere to spend the night. I suppose to some of the people in the crowded supermarket from which I had bought my provisions, I had looked like a vagrant but to others, a not so youthful-looking adventure scout. It was over a week since I had spent a night in a proper bed and although I had planned my isolation, there were things I had forgotten. My backpack was now heavy and I was looking forward to getting some of the weight off my weary shoulders.

  It seemed a lot longer than a week. I had hardly spoken to anybody in that time; in fact, I had deliberately gone out of my way to make sure I did not speak to anybody. My mind needed sorting out before I even considered discussing what I was doing, or what I had done, with anybody else.

  Was there anybody with whom I could discuss such things?

  Would anybody understand?

  Would anybody want to understand?

  I was isolated within my own loneliness. There were parts of me that rebelled against what I was doing, but my subconscious understood. What I was doing was not wrong: I hadn’t done any harm to anything or anybody. There were those who would be concerned that what I was doing was weird – the only word I can and maybe they could think of – but I hoped that the verbal and written explanations I had provided would be sufficient to justify my absence and the need to be on my own.

  There had been plenty of time to come to terms with the creeping inevitability of Belinda’s death and I had tried to make her last months, weeks and days on this earth as painless, both physically and mentally, as possible. She had been tremendous, which in many ways had made my own situation even worse. She was far, far better at facing up to her illness than I was.

  I marvelled at her, the way she could smile when she was in a lot of pain, the way she could remain positive when she had every reason to be despondent.

  She planned, she understood and she was tidy.

  It was almost as though she had passed over to a different plain and was able to view from an entirely dissimilar perspective the fact that she was dying. Her life was ending but she did not want mine to end with hers: how hard that was to accept and it remains difficult to acknowledge. She made me make promises, promises that I would have great difficulty in keeping.

  That was the reason why I was now in the middle of a dense and quickly darkening Derbyshire wood, looking down at another poor soul whose life was at an untimely end.

  I had made sure before I left home that as many loose ends as possible were sorted so there was nothing to stop me from getting away. In many ways I thought that by being on my own I would be closer to her: the memories, both recent and distant could be with me. There would be nothing to distract me from being with her: hearing her laugh, seeing that look in her eyes when she did not agree with me but still allowed me to make my point.

  It would give me time to think further back to when the children were born and the way she made sure that I was never alone.

  The twins were a handful but she always had time for me, she always had time for us. The children did not come between us because she always made me feel as though I was the most important person in her life.

  However, I made it especially difficult for her because I was away a lot of the time and when I returned she had to make room for me in their routine – the private life she had with the children when I wasn’t there. She constantly told me, when I felt conscience stricken about being away so much, that I did as much as I could. It helped but I always felt that I never did enough. The changes in the twins were so swift that even when my absence was shorter than normal, I would return to another transformation. Then as soon as we had established a routine that included me, I was off again and they had to revert to the world that was known to only the three of them.

  It would have helped if the house had not been isolated. I worried about her and the children’s safety and, although I spent a lot of money on securing the house, I knew Belinda rarely made use of the alarms and the sophisticated locking system when I was away.

  She loved the country.

  Once the children were older, she revelled in the hours the three of them spent exploring the many woods and valleys in the area, and what they had to offer. When I was at home, they would take me out and show me what they had discovered – a nest here, a badger’s set there, the fallen old oak that had collapsed during the latest gale but still clung to life. They showed me the remnants of the dam they had built and asked whether they should have built it higher or thicker. Daddy built dams and that is what took him all over the world. Building one across the brook at the bottom of the field down from Elliot’s farm, brought them closer to me, or so they said.

  When we were out, reliving their experiences, Belinda would deliberately hang back to let David and Isabelle have me all to themselves. There were other times when Belinda and I could bury ourselves in each other and try to make up for lost time. There were never any recriminations. The time we had together during my brief re-appearances was too short to spend it arguing. I knew what the separation was doing to me and I could only guess what it was doing to her, but she never told me. We had agreed that I would have a career change when I was forty – a chance to be at home and lead a proper family life.

  Then, three years before I was due to stop my wanderings and almost two years ago to the day, I returned home from a trip to Nigeria and it was obvious that something had happened.

  By this time, the twins were ensconced in a boarding school in Hertfordshire. They had discussed what they wanted between themselves: they had not included Belinda or me. Then they announced one day – they said they deliberately waited until I was at home – that they wanted to go to boarding school. We were shocked: they had seemed happy going to the local school in the village a half mile down the lane from the house and we had assumed that the comprehensive a few miles further away held equal attractions.

  Its reputation was the best.

  However, according to the children, this wasn’t the plan they wished to follow. If I could afford it, they wanted to go away to school and, they insisted, to
the same one. Belinda had been to boarding school and, surprisingly, after getting over the initial uncertainty, she was all for it. She believed that academically both schools would be on an equal par, but for continuity and social awareness, nothing could beat a boarding school. I reluctantly agreed, and before I knew it, the twins had gone. That same weekend Belinda told me not to worry; she would fill her time by getting a part-time job somewhere.

  “After all,” she said, “I do have a degree and it’s about time I made use of it.”

  Belinda and I met at Leeds University and we married the year after we both graduated, she with a 2nd Class Honours in sociology and me with a 1st Class Honours in marine engineering. We had scraped a living initially, but then I was fortunate to get a job with an American international company that planned, designed, built and maintained many of the dams in the Third World. Once with them I never looked back, we never looked back. The money was excellent but the downside was that I was away a lot. Fortunately, Belinda fell pregnant after we had been married for three years and the twins, David and Isabelle, were the result.

  Originally, we bought a house in Warwickshire but then moved across into Leicestershire which meant when I was away Belinda could be closer to her parents who lived in Market Harborough.

  I had been in Nigeria for a month and arrived home in the middle of the twins’ summer holidays. Having taken a month off, and within two days of my return, all four of us were on an aircraft destined for Florida and Disney World.

  Neither Belinda nor I were in the holiday mood, but of course, we had to disguise our concerns for the children’s sake. The evening before we flew, we had all gone out for a meal and then the twins had reluctantly gone to bed early because we would have to get up at five o’clock in the morning.

  Having poured a couple of strong gin and tonics, Belinda and I went into the conservatory.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked, sitting next to her on the wicker two-seater sofa.

  She kicked off her shoes and put her feet on the small table in front of her. “What makes you think there’s something the matter with me?” she replied morosely.

  “Your answer confirms that there is something.”

  She stood up, her anxiety obvious in her inability to sit still, and went over to the window, clutching her glass to her chest. She turned to face me and there were tears in her eyes.

  I started to get up but she held up her hand and shook her head.

  “No, Richard, stay where you are please. There is something I have to tell you but …”

  “Come on, love, what is it?”

  She took a sip of her drink and bowed her head.

  “A couple of weeks after you flew to Nigeria, I went to the doctor and the results came through the other day.”

  “Results? What results?” I thought the penny had dropped. I smiled. “You’re not are you?”

  Belinda did not return my smile.

  “No, I’m not, Richard, and even if I were pregnant it would be the last thing on my mind at the moment.” She peered into her glass as she spoke and ran her index finger round its rim. “I’ve got cancer,” she added quickly without looking up.

  A silence fell as what she had said tried to drill itself into my brain. I felt my heartbeat quicken and I could hear the pulse beating in my ears. Belinda lifted her head and looked at me. The tears were now rolling down her cheeks. I crossed the few feet between us and took her in my arms. Burying her face in my shoulder, she cried. I pressed her head against me, the view through the window becoming a blur as my eyes became glazed with my own tears.

  It was something we had never discussed: it was something we believed would never happen to either of us, so why did we need to discuss it?

  Apart from my long absences, we had been rather lucky. The twins were coping well with their young lives and had not presented us with many of the problems experienced by other families. Belinda and I had been married for thirteen years and our love for each other had grown almost daily. I regarded her as my best friend and I was hers. We had become lovers a month after we met, and twenty years later, we were still lovers. I missed her terribly when I was away. Sometimes I would lie in a lonely hotel bed on the opposite side of the world and tell myself that being apart was punishment for being extremely happy. When I boarded the plane to fly back to her, I was like a young child, full of excitement and longing.

  Now, in a few unexpected words, it was possible that our idyllic world was going to be shattered.

  Holding her close to me, the wetness of her tears on my cheek, I knew I was going to fail her. I knew that there was nothing I could say or do that was going to make the horrible realisation of what she had told me go away. I didn’t want to know any more and yet wanted to know everything. I needed to be told that she was not going to leave me, she wasn’t going to leave the world we had both built to house our love for each other and the love we had for the twins. I wanted her to tell me that it – and I had to think of it as it – had been caught early enough for her to be completely cured.

  Something told me that she was not going to be able to give me that reassurance and that our time together was limited. I had to have the strength to face the truth and make what time we had left together as painless and as happy as circumstances would allow. Being selfish was not an option: she would not be thinking of herself, she would not be thinking of dying, she would be thinking of how I was going to manage without her.

  Two years is all we had.

  They were two years that sped by in what seemed like a quarter of the time. Belinda received the best treatment possible and that gave us longer than we could ever have hoped for. We spent the time crying and laughing together. The Managing Director of the company I worked for was marvellous and created a job for me which allowed me to work from home for most of the time. I had to go over to the States about once every couple of months but only for a few days.

  On that fateful evening, once neither of us could cry any more, Belinda told me that she had put off going to see the doctor because she could not, and would not, accept that there was anything wrong with her. Even if there was, what the future held for her was too frightening to contemplate.

  When I was away, she buried herself in her work, and spring-cleaned the house from top to bottom at every opportunity. She had felt a lot of discomfort in her lower back but she put it down to over-exertion.

  Then the pain began to spread upwards. She told me nothing because she did not want to worry me but eventually, once she knew I was engrossed in my work in Nigeria, she went to our GP. He immediately sent her to a specialist in Leicester and it was his report she had received a couple of days before I came home. There was a malignant growth centred in her right lung; there were also signs that it had already begun to spread.

  She had surgery followed by courses of radio and chemotherapy. At first, the prognosis was good but suddenly, after a year, she became quite ill. She fought and fought and there were days when she would smile and tell me it had all gone away, but then within twenty-four hours the smile would disappear.

  She continued to work until the last couple of months and the doctor told me afterwards that her perseverance and stubbornness had kept her going. The treatment she received was secondary only to her own will power.

  Early on she lost weight but it seemed to stabilise. Once the twins went back to school we discussed over and over again whether they should be told but decided that the longer we were able to hide the truth the better it would be for them. However, in March this year when Belinda became too ill to work, they had to know.

  I went down to their school and told them. Their young minds fought against it initially but then almost overnight they seemed to mature. Isabelle automatically assumed the maternal role and during the early stages of the Easter holidays took over the cooking, washing and cleaning from me, and told me to spend as much time as I could with mummy. David, bless him, felt slightly marginalised which meant he took to cleaning the cars w
hen they did not need it, mowing the lawn although the grass hadn’t started growing after the winter, and generally doing manly things.

  Belinda died a week before the end of the Easter holidays, only four weeks after I had told the twins how ill their mother was. She spent a few days in hospital, but when we were told that there was nothing more that could be done, she insisted on coming home.

  Her parents came to stay for the final few days. They had aged dramatically, especially her mother, and although her father put on a brave face, the worry took its toll.

  Each night I held Belinda as she slept.

  Then early one morning, she was not able to hang on to life any longer. I felt her take her final breath and she was still, at last at rest

  The peacefulness and relief showed in her beautiful face.

  She had been an inspiration to us all and to the many friends who had helped.

  At her funeral, the local village church was full to capacity. She had not wanted any flowers, other than from immediate family. Instead, she asked people to give to Cancer Relief.

  It was her wish for her grave to be in the church cemetery close to the old wooden bridge, which we, as a family, fondly called Pooh Bridge. Next to the bridge was the ford she loved, she always said it took her back to when times were simple.

  Standing on the bridge once everybody had gone, I felt guilty as I recalled something I had thought when I suddenly accepted one day that I was going to lose Belinda.

  From the day she pleaded with the hospital to let her go home, I knew that I would have to get away as soon after her death as was decent. I knew that the house, the garden, the surrounding countryside, even the shops we used to visit would hold too many memories of her presence and I did not want to share her passing with anyone.

  I had to get away.

  The time had now come and I wished I had never had the thought in the first place.